PA-PRO-2015-004

PANDA is a future hadron and nuclear physics experiment at the FAIR facility in construction in Darmstadt, Germany. In contrast with the majority of current experiments, PANDA's strategy for data acquisition is based on event reconstruction and selection from free-streaming data, performed in real time entirely by software algorithms using global detector information.
This paper reports the status of the development of algorithms for the reconstruction of charged particle tracks, optimized for use in online data processing applications, using General-Purpose Graphic Processing Units.
Two algorithms for trackfinding, the Triplet Finder and the Circle Hough are described, with details of their GPU implementations. Average track reconstruction times of less than 100 ns are obtained running the Triplet Finder on state-of-the-art computing-grade GPU cards.
In addition, a proof-of-concept system for the dispatch of data to tracking algorithms using Message Queues is presented.